Post Tagged with: "WhatsApp"

TEL AVIV — PayKey, an intriguing Israeli startup that lets banks offer payments on any social media platform — and we mean any — won the demo contest at Bank Innovation Israel 2016 here this week. PayKey beat out 12 other finalists at the DEMOvation Challenge at Bank Innovation Israel,Read More

Many banks have them. Many banks spend money on them. Nearly all of those banks ignore them. The “them” is text banking apps, and the degree to which they have been marginalized baffles me. Earlier this week, I asked a top innovation executive at one of this nation’s largest financialRead More

Messaging apps dominate smartphone use, particularly by millennials, so shouldn’t banks want to be where their customers are? Craft Silicon, based in Nairobi, Kenya, certainly thinks so. It aims to help banks connect with customers by bringing simple banking functionality to messaging apps. At FinDEVr in New York Wednesday, CEO Kamal BudhabhattiRead More

Messaging apps are huge in payments — or rather, they may be someday. Facebook Messenger has confirmed that it is pursuing peer-to-peer payments and e-commerce, a path blazed by China’s WeChat, which has 650 million users and features multiple payment functions. That despite the fact that trust in mobile P2P money transfer is stillRead More

This is the last of a series that looks at the big dog ambitions in Fintech. So far I have covered Google, Alibaba and Apple. (I have not covered Amazon as I have not discovered any major moves yet – please tell me if I have missed something). Speculation alert: Facebook has not yet […]

The reviews on the BBVA-Simple deal are starting to come in, and they are not pretty. First, the specs. BBVA agreed to acquire Simple today for $117 million. Simple has around 100,000 customers and says it processed $1.7 billion of transactions last year. Brett King, the industry analyst and Moven founder, putRead More

WhatsApp has 450 million active mobile users. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has 15.6 million, most among any bank in the US. WhatsApp has 32 engineers. JPM employs 260,000. That’s the deficiency of banks in a nutshell. If you don’t “get” why Facebook has agreed to pay around $19 billion for WhatsApp,Read More